Marriage Matters: ‘Once upon a time…’

Friday

Jul 18, 2014 at 8:00 PM

‘Once upon a time…” For many, those words are magic, marking the doorway into a different world.

By James and Audora Burg

‘Once upon a time…” For many, those words are magic, marking the doorway into a different world. As children, most of our stories began that way; as adults, although none of our reading material contains that explicit invocation, the invitation remains.We have been thinking about the power of story since we ran across this Native American proverb: “Tell me a fact and I’ll learn. Tell me a truth and I’ll believe. But tell me a story and it will live in my heart forever.”Audora has experienced the truth of this the hard way. What she reads stays with her in much the same way that a song gets “stuck” in her head, thus she has learned she must exercise caution when choosing reading material. That lesson became vibrantly apparent after reading one particular scene in an otherwise enjoyable medical thriller; the darkness of the human cruelty depicted in those four pages haunts her still.But the sticking power of stories holds in the positive direction, too. We see it clearly when we watch toddler Paul act out storylines from adventures involving his favorite animated character, Little Charley Bear. Something takes hold of his imagination, and he brings it to life.With our shared love of reading, we were primed to be intrigued by the title of an article by Lauren Martin on elitedaily.com: “Why readers, scientifically, are the best people to fall in love with.” She reports that studies published by Canadian psychologists concluded that fiction-readers are capable of the most empathy and “theory of mind,” or the ability to see another’s point of view. We wrote recently about the power and importance of empathy in marriage… add to it the power of story.The late Michael White, an Australian social worker and family therapist, pioneered narrative therapy, or the use of storytelling, to externalize and reshape a difficult situation or reality from a more positive perspective.Outside the therapy room, people instinctively use a narrative approach in framing their understanding of situations and relationships. Consider how most people speak of their marriages. Rarely do they recite a straightforward list of bullet pointed-facts; rather, their account takes a narrative form – they tell a story, and they often call it “our story.” Generalizing from our own experience, our story has positively shaped how we see our marriage, and each other. Retelling that story is a powerful force in reinforcing the framework of our Us. Telling our story reminds us of who we are and establishes a “master narrative” that encourages us in an Us-ly direction, towards living out our personal “happily ever after.”

James Burg, Ph.D., is an associate professor at Indiana University-Purdue, Fort Wayne. His wife, Audora, is a freelance writer. You may contact them at marriage@charter.net.